I've been a user since 2011. I love the simplicity of the site.
A few years ago all the old-timers that paid once in the past have been asked to switch to a subscription plan.
I would have happily done it if it wasn't for the abysmal support. Twice I emailed about an issue and haven't even gotten as much as a confirmation that my mail was received.
With a product as simple as this, I can get behind saying no to feature requests, but there are actual bugs that are ignored.
Is there maybe some sort of self-hostable php solution like this?
I only post on HN about once a year. But I want to chime in on this topic.
At my current job we started a clean slate codebase (react/redux/webpack) beginning of 2016 and had everything typechecked by Flow from the start.
We found Flow to be extremely unreliable and cumbersome to use with not much apparent commitment behind it. As soon as Typescript hit 2.0 we converted the entire codebase (fairly easy to do since the syntax and semantics are very similar') and have been super happy with that decision.
I wholly agree on you remark about soundness vs. tooling. Flow tooling sucked, error messages were cryptic and unhelpful and we ran into obvious mistakes all the time that Flow did NOT catch, without being able to figure out why that was. Editor support was lacking and we just never trusted the typechecker.
Bolting on types to Javascript has tradeoffs and Microsoft did an amazing job of making the right tradeoffs.
There is noticeable effort and momentum behind the project that inspires a lot of confidence in the languages future. It has completely changed the way I write Javascript and I can't imagine going back to an untyped world.
That change was not in rock-solid confidence that TS catches all my errors (although it does a remarkably good job at that), but the sheer productivity improvement types enable (autocompletion, project-wide renaming, all that stuff users of Java or C# IDEs have available to them).
You don't need military software for that.
A bit of common sense and a healthy skepticism of what officials try to tell you is enough.
They can delay the inevitable, but not save Greece' finances.
You don't go out of debt by taking on more debt while selling out your best assets at the same time.
As much as I despise PHP, I think it's a valid language for taking your first steps in.
From your post it's not easy to tell what you're exactly having trouble with, but I suspect it's a general feeling of being lost.
Be aware that for your project you probably need to read up a bit/learn a little of the following:
- Programming basics: Variables, types, expressions and statements, control flow (loops, if/else)
- Web development basics: HTML and CSS to build your pages, a little knowledge about HTTP can't hurt either (GET vs. POST for you form, maybe Basic-Authentication). PHP will take care of the gritty details here
- Not sure if you want to store your forms in a database. If you do, you'll have to look for a php/mysql tutorial. There should be plenty around the web.
- Finally you need to set up some kind of development environment. WAMPserver comes with everything you need. On Mac there's MAMP, which is easier in the beginning than setting it up on your own.
Don't expect this to go fast. There's a lot of reading and playing around involved.
If you start enjoying this and feel comfortable in PHP, you should look for a different language though. While PHP is comfortable to learn and good for first steps, I think it's actually counterproductive to try to build anything bigger with it.
The PHP ecosystem is poised with mediocrity and bad code. While it's actually possible to write good code in PHP, it's hard to find examples of good programming and the languages horrible design makes it actually difficult (though not impossible) to express yourself well and write good code.
I would have happily done it if it wasn't for the abysmal support. Twice I emailed about an issue and haven't even gotten as much as a confirmation that my mail was received.
With a product as simple as this, I can get behind saying no to feature requests, but there are actual bugs that are ignored.
Is there maybe some sort of self-hostable php solution like this?